What Would I Add?

I think I would have learned more and enjoyed it more (hard to believe I could have done that!) if I had interacted with other participants in a more formal way than just inviting friends to My Space. Maybe a buddy for the course. It's always more fun with a friend.

What a Long Fun Trip It's Been!

To paraphrase Robert Hunter it's been very fun and I have learned to do so much that I thought I would never do: My Space, Flickr, Bloglines, Podcasts and so on. I got so excited by learning how to do podcasts I bought an MP3 player and downloaded some casts as well copied some of my favorite music. This program offered me the impetus I needed to learn some technological things that I otherwise might not have found time for. Now I want to keep learning! My favorite parts of the exercise was RSS, Library Thing, Flickr and ebooks. I was surprised that most of the exercises (after a bumpy couple!) were easily completed. When I got stuck I talked to my colleagues and we figured it out together - that helped all of us! I think the program as it is worked very well; I can't think of how it could be improved. Yes, yes, yes, more training like this would be wonderful and of great benefit to me and to my patrons! If I could go back in time I would tell myself - go - go - go - you'll have so much fun and learn so much! One of my favorite things about the program is reading other people's blogs. Wow we have some very talented people on our staff! And funny!

Overdrive to the MP3 Player

There are so many books I want to put on my MP3 player but I'll have to wait until I can download them here at the library. I had dial-up at home so it's impossible to download a book to it. I installed the software but when I looked at the size of the book I knew it would be impossible to download a book. But soon...!

Podcasts

Oh, I love Radio Open Source, so it was hard not to just dig around in there! I added a RSS feed to Bloglines account about Harry Potter. It's produced by a group of people who love HP. Who could resist a podcast detailed: "Listen to the latest Harry Potter talk and unwind while listening most unsystematic conversations ever." Too cool.

Our Tube

It is certainly true that you can waste tremendous amounts of time on You Tube! Where to start? Gardens, Italy, food, gardens in Italy, food in Italy. So many choices! I settled on Monterosso on the Cinque Terre where we stayed for two nights last month. Now I can show everyone one of the shops we went in! It was hard to stop at looking at just a few videos. I think You Tube would be great to show the Global Reading Challenges that we have around the county. We could have the final challenge in each region and then the grand challenge. Teachers could show it to students who were interested in the program and drum up even more excitement than before. I don't know about the whole issue of kids being filmed and their images appearing on You Tube. Maybe we could give them a special password? Not sure how that works, but it's an idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C6zhFTfkNo

Web 2.0 Award Nominees

I chose to use this site and picked Biblio.com to explore. What a great site! I looked for a couple of children's books that were out of print as well as a few gardening books. The books were easy to search for and I liked the extra information listed about the book as well as sometimes information from the publisher. I also liked the sidebar options for ways to search for books I didn't know I wanted!

Google Labs

Oh, this was fun! I struck out comparing organic gardening and conventional gardening; Patricia Wells and Lidia Bastianich; dendrobium and cymbidium orchids. All of these searches had such low volume of traffic there wasn't a graph available to track them. I finally found a good match with Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali. Lots of articles and traffic about both of them. I really liked the regions part of the graph where it showed that Batali had the most trend history in the US, particularly New York city. I liked the way I could see the search volume and the news reference volume and explore the articles that were highlighted with letters. A very useful tool for comparisons but not much use if your search terms don't register enough traffic for a graph.

Hoho with Zoho and Google Docs

I made spreadsheet documents with both Zoho and Google documents and I much preferred Zoho. It was much easier to figure out the spreadsheet capabilities and I liked the look of it much better. I definitely have some uses in mind for it to share documents with other librarians for my professional life and with gardeners in my home life.

Library 2.0 Will Take Us to a New Place

I ended up reading all five articles and I'm glad I did, because I might not have read the last article which was my favorite. I have read a bit in the past about library 2.0 and not understood it very well, but Tom Storey described it very well. Michael Stephens article was great! I even learned a new word: meme. I had to look it up as I didn't know what it meant. Here's a link to Wikipedia's definition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme. I liked how he talked about how "this" librarian talks to the patrons who use the library or would like to use the library and gets their input as to how the library could be improved or made better for them. I also appreciated these sentiments: "This librarian does not buy technology for the sake of technology. “Techno-worship” does not exist here. Without a firm foundation in the mission and goals of the institution, new technologies are not implemented for the sake of coolness and status." Right on! Rick Anderson's article Away From the "Icebergs" seemed very arch to me and I don't agree that our libraries are circulating less than before. Maybe at the University of Arizona in Reno but not at our libraries! Chip Nilges article seemed mostly to be tooting OCLC's horn and was very hard to read. Probably because he was talking about many things I don't understand! I enjoyed John Riemer's article with its discussion of meta data and how it can improve our libraries and the success rate of our patrons using the catalog; I completely agree. And so we come to my favorite article Dr. Wendy Schultz's To a Temporary Place in Time... I'm looking forward to her version of library 4.0; especially the comfy chairs and the single malt scotch!

Rollyo or Google Custom

I used the search term "branch locations" in Rollyo and came up with pages and pages of results that listed Seattle Public but none of the other libraries. I spent quite a lot of time going page to page and not finding anything but Seattle Public. I changed the search terms to "library branch locations" and though the ads moved to the top of the page rather than being interpersed, there were still no results other than Seattle Public. I then went over to Google custom and tried the search terms "branch locations" and on the first page of results King County, Sno-Isle and Seattle Public showed up. I looked through about 18 pages and Tacoma Public did not show up. I definitely liked the look of Google custom much better than Rollyo and the results were much better! I thought the Rollyo page was much too cluttered.

I created my own search engine in Google custom and then tried it out. It worked great! What a fun thing to do and I can see some real advantages to using a limited set of web pages. It seems a little like Bloglines but with a much narrower scope. It's much easier to go through the results when you have just a few websites!

Here's the link to my search engine:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=004868165741088363653%3Aywztfz3wf7e

Playing Around in South Park Land

What a fun way to waste some time! I had a hard time choosing all the elements that I wanted to include in the South Park figure - look kind of like myself or Kenny? Hard decision but finally went for something like myself.

Also, using the Italian name generator I created an Italian name for myself for when I go to Italy in ten days:

Your Italian Name Is...

Assunta Bianchi

What's" Your Italian Name?

For now arrivederci!

Wild Wiki

It does seem that wikis could become quite wild, depending on who was changing the page. I enjoyed browsing through several libraries wikis, as well as the Book Lover's - there are some good books suggested there. I was fascinated by wiki wars and how some pages can ban people from changing a page if they become too disagreeable. I think it's interesting that most of the library wikis have a link to the page they want you to read, but you can't change that page - just the wiki. I guess that's one way to keep control of content. As far as the our library goes I'd like to see a wiki with book suggestions for children's librarians. I also like Sarah's idea of having a wiki for each branch; that would have been helpful with the snow!

Wild Library Thing

I don't know what it is, but when I see or think about Library Thing I start singing "Wild Thing, you make my heart sing." I guess it's my age! Anyway, WOW I love Library Thing! So many possibilities for my home collection! It was fascinating to see how many people had the same books I did. There are even 2 people who also have Weeds of the West in their collection. Who knew! I have already told several non library people about it and they are as excited as I am. I can hardly wait to start organizing my home collection.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=cecilia.mcgowan

Technorati A Go Go

It was hard to believe how different the results were when I searched blog posts, in tags and the blog directory. I found in the blog directory that San Jose Public Library is also doing Learning 2.0 but they only have to do 23 things! What's up with that David?! But...they only get a flashdrive when they complete the program which definitely isn't as good as our prize.

I first searched Technorati with the terms KCLS 27 things and got completely different results from when I searched KCLS27things and kcls27things. I'm glad I searched the three ways; I found some great blogs! I then looked for my blog and was humbled to discover this phrase: "There is nothing in the known universe tagged storygarden." Okay, well what about the unknown universe?

Delicious in So Many Ways

What a labrinyth del.icio.us is! I could spend quite a bit of time digging deeper and deeper into subjects I am interested in. I played around with the item The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users. It was interesting to see all the tags people had made for this article as well as what they had to say about the good and not-so-good features. I liked how I could click on the common tags and be taken to other sites that have been tagged with the same word. I liked that when I was taken to the page where the sites for the tagged word are listed the word is in a box at the top. I could definitely see how we can use this in the library setting by having in one place sites or articles that are of interest to us. I can also see how this would be of great use to some of our patrons. Now I just have to find the time to show them how to do this!

My Space - Not Your Space

I can see how people could really get into My Space. It makes sense when kids are so connected that they would want to be involved in an online place like this. I can see how it would work well if you had a book club and had the kids on your list of friends and sent them updates about books they might want to read. I wonder how parents would feel about that? And I wonder how kids would feel about their Space being "invaded" by adults. Even if the invasion was from an adult they knew and liked.

I imagine I will leave my page pretty plain as it takes so much time to change - but I may find a few minutes to do some customizing.

My Space and Social Networking

I enjoyed reading all the articles (I read them all since I know so little about the subject I thought it would be a good idea to learn as much as possible!) I guess one of the reasons I have stayed away from My Space is that I think my daughter, who has a My Space account, would be mortified if I went in and asked to be a "friend". I guess I'll have to sneak on and keep a low profile - just what parents are supposed to do.

I think Facebook sounds more like the social network for me since My Space has gotten so big but I'll participate in My Space as part of our learning experience.

I'm really intrigued by Second Life and love the idea of avatars. Infoblog's article was a great introduction and invitation to participate in the Second Life Library and Info Island. I can see KCLS being involved in social networks in able to reach patrons we wouldn't otherwise interact with. My biggest concern personally about all of this is that people are meeting and communicating online in record numbers but have cut down on face-to-face interactions with others. Balance is everything and I think many have a hard time with it in their personal lives. And all of this takes SO MUCH TIME! Time I'm spending on blogging and posting and online networking is time that has to be taken from somewhere else: reading books, gardening, cooking and meeting people in person. Thankfully I have a dial-up connection at home so I'm not even tempted to get my soul sucked out by spending too much time online.

Finding the Feeds

Of the RSS search tools I found Syndic8.com to be the best of the lot. Blogline's search tool was also good but Feedster and Topix were just pain confusing. I didn't go to sites that I already knew about; I searched for something new. I really liked some of the blogs I found that were done by library employees around the country. On one of the search tools searching under children's literature gave me some surprising and unpalatable results.

RSS Heaven!

What a great way to keep track of blogs and news! I loved how I can organize the feeds into different folders - children's literature and library sites for work and gardening and cooking for my personal use. And Unshelved for a kick of humor each day. I think teaching a class to patrons about RSS would really help some of them look for and organize information.

Fun With Mashups

What fun the suggested mashups are! I think my favorites are Montagr where I made a montage of shiba inus like my dog and Flickr Color Pickr where I could go wild with finding images of flowers from the color wheel. Of the two I think that Flickr Color Pickr will provide the impetus for using color in my blog. We don't own the book Flickr Hacks by the author of the blog Flickr Color Pickr, but I'm going to ILL it.

Fun With Flickr

Me and Vigo
Originally uploaded by cecilia.mcgowan.

Okay, this wasn't quite as easy as I thought it would be! Thankfully Erin was able to help step me through where to go to grant access to Flickr for my blog. That was the most difficult part of the process. Setting up the account and moving the photos over was fun and easy. Now I want to move a bunch of photos on to Flickr!

27 Things

I couldn't believe how simple it was to create a blog! I'm hoping to learn about as much as I can from the 27 Things so I won't seem clueless when kids ask me questions!